


no one can lift the damn thing

by Haeronwen



Series: Books & Boxes [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, Arthur is a frustrated librarian, Chance Meetings, Eames is a starving artist, M/M, awkward academics, mush ensues, overly perky receptionists, so much mush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:18:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5536211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haeronwen/pseuds/Haeronwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a library.  There is a love story.  It is not quite Jane Austen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no one can lift the damn thing

There is a situation in the Religion section.

“Is there a code for this?” Ariadne wants to know.  She is standing next to him in the stacks with her hands buried in the pockets of her blue hooded jacket and her Beats headphones hanging around her neck.  In light of the gravity of the situation, she has paused her Wednesday playlist.

“A code,” Arthur says, slowly.

“It feels like we should have a code for this.”

Arthur thinks, not for the first time, that he probably should have hired the guy with the mutton chops.  The problem with Ariadne is that she has yet to have all her hopes and dreams brutally crushed by an uncaring world, and consequently she does things like smile at people who have obviously only come in to use the restroom, and bring Arthur brownies from the bakery on Elm when she _knows_ he’s trying to limit his intake of sugar.  When she came in for the interview Arthur wrote ‘perky’ in his notebook and underlined it, and she read his handwriting upside down and said, “I like to think so.”

The trouble is, they don’t get a lot of applications for voluntary positions, but they also can’t afford to make the voluntary positions paid.  Ariadne had no previous experience – or questionable facial hair, or recent convictions, which set her apart somewhat.  Her resumé amounted to lifeguarding the last three summers at a State Park in between studying full-time at BU; under interests, she’d put _architecture_ , _J. B. Priestley_ , and _Jared Leto_ (and Arthur chose not to hold that against her).

“You know,” Ariadne says.  “In case this kind of thing happens again.  We should come up with a code.”

Arthur gives her A Look, which as usual falls slightly short of effective, and then he goes to return the Star Wars novelizations to their proper shelf.

-

Ellison Library is not the Bodleian.  It is not even the best library in the county.  Realistically speaking, it probably ranks just above those libraries on wheels, in so far as _it doesn’t have wheels_.  It’s in a nice-ish building.  Arthur likes it.  He’s actually unaccountably fond of it: the creaky floorboards and the mismatched shelves, the big windows in the Magnolia Wing that get the sun in the morning.  The way the library office is tucked away upstairs so Arthur only ever has to deal with the people who actually want to take books out.  Most days he goes without having to answer any stupid questions at all; a lot of that, he knows, has to do with Ariadne screening them beforehand, which is really why he keeps her around.

On Friday he heads in a little early and grabs a coffee and a raspberry hot chocolate from the Lone Gull, and approaching the library the light catches it in such a way that the roof looks a little less run down, the paint job a little less shabby.  He and Ariadne perch on the reception desk clutching their drinks and talk about last week’s episode of Game of Thrones and then Arthur makes a start on the shelf-marks and bar codes for books donated the previous week.  Around eleven he gets to tell a user that they don’t have _Twilight_ or in fact any of the sequels because he refuses to classify Stephenie Meyer’s work as literature.  At eleven thirty he correctly identifies _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ based on the descriptor “I don’t remember the title, but Harrison Ford was in it, and it rained a lot”.  At twelve thirty he puts a sign on the office door and eats his turkey on whole grain while listening to The Smiths.

All in all, Arthur goes a good four hours without thinking about awkward dinners with college roommates who went on to be successful litigators, or that ex-boyfriend who _found himself_ in a gymnastics instructor in Australia.  These are the better days, when his mother doesn’t call with news of a cousin’s engagement and proceed to make, “How’s the library?” sound like, _When are you going to stop being stubborn and get a proper career, with prospects and a decent pension plan?_

It’s hard for her, Arthur knows—particularly when he went and got her hopes up, straight As, Princeton, _magna cum laude_ , and to top it off a nice boy who called her Mrs Cohen and pulled her chair out for her.  Arthur’s mother was more disappointed when Leo took off on his gap year than Arthur was.  Arthur doesn’t _miss him_ , as such, except in the way that you miss having someone around who knows how to fix the TiVo when it bitches out, but sometimes he sees photos on Facebook of Leo and Min-Ho against backdrops of white sand beaches and thinks it’d be nice to be on the other side of this equation.

The East Coast in June doesn’t quite compare.

As for his career trajectory, what his mother fails entirely to recognise is that Arthur is not cut out for litigation or medicine or really any of the jobs she’d have liked him to have.  His degree in Information Sciences made a kind of sense to him that nothing else did, felt comfortable in a way that nothing else was.

Arthur is not the shooting star that his mother hoped he would be, but that’s okay.  Arthur is ordinary, and that’s okay, too.

-

To: Library Assistant <libraryassistant@ellisonlibrary.org>  
From: Roberta Gardner <regardner@gmail.com>  
Subject: Re: Enquiry

> Dear Arthur,
> 
> Many thanks for your help regarding the edition of cummings’ letters, I have contacted Mark Leivers as you suggested.  In the meantime, I wonder if you could assist me in locating a recent article on the influence of the haiku form on cummings’ work?
> 
> As always, any assistance you can offer is much appreciated.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Roberta

Eames stretches at his desk and takes a sip of his bottled water, careful to replace the cap, and then hums and clicks _send_.  He leans back in his chair and watches through the glass partition as Arthur opens the new message.  Not for the first time, he wonders if this is getting out of hand.

-

It happens like this:

It is raining, and Eames is wet.  More importantly, his sketchbook is getting wet, despite his best efforts to wrap his body around it like a shield, and if this morning’s work gets smudgy then he’s going to have to do something ugly and depressing like consuming an entire tub of ice cream in one sitting.  And really, what was the point in moving to another fucking country if he’s going to end up just as damp and miserable as he was in England?  He’s starting to think that being a starving artist in a foreign city is not as romantic as it seemed when Gene Kelly did it, and also possibly that his mother was right.

He hates it when his mother is right.

These are the things that are going through Eames’s head when he ducks into the library on the corner of Proctor Street.  It’s actually not a whole lot warmer inside than it was out, but at least it’s dry.  Eames is on the verge of shaking himself off, dog-like, when he realises that he is being watched by a small but perfectly formed human sitting behind a reception desk.

“Raining out?” she says, cheerfully.

Eames rubs the back of his neck and tries to look more like someone who frequents libraries, as opposed to someone who takes shelter in them until the rain stops.  “Are you open to the public?” he asks, with his best, most endearing smile.  “Am I all right to just take a look around?”

“As long as you don’t drip on the books,” she replies, with a grin.  “There’s no food or hot drinks allowed in the stacks or the reading room—bottled water only.  And no pens.  Coats and bags have to go in the lockers.”

“No pens?” he says.  “But how will I scrawl all over the books?”

“You’ll just have to use pencil,” she says, and Eames grins, charmed.

“Aren’t you a little young to be a librarian?” he asks, because she does look it—he’d have taken her for a high school student, with the Converses and the headphones.

“I understand that my very impressive demeanour may have led you to believe otherwise, but I am in fact a lowly grunt.”  She gestures to her badge, which, sure enough, identifies her as _Ariadne Clarke, Volunteer_.  “Arthur’s office is up the stairs and to the right.  I’d keep clear, though, he missed breakfast this morning and low blood sugar makes him grumpy.”

“I’ll tread lightly,” he assures her, and disappears into the stacks.

-

Dom Cobb is back, and squinting at structural surveys.  Arthur likes Dom.  He does.  Dom is, yes, erratic and slightly prone to melodrama, and he _absolutely_ needs to get reading glasses, but he is also the only person who ever enters the hallowed halls – the under-heated rooms – of Ellison Library and asks interesting questions.  Of course, it is also true that since his divorce questions have tended to err on the side of _if she loved me, why did she leave me?_ The catalogue search engine doesn’t have a field for relationship crises, but sometimes Arthur slips a copy of _Rebuilding: When Your Marriage Ends_ in between the schematics and that’s about as close as he’ll be getting to that particular emotional minefield, thanks.

Still, Arthur quite likes postmodern architecture; he took a class as a sophomore when it seemed less likely to involve waders than Environmental Science.  More importantly, Dom’s research involves lots of time-consuming searches for specific details of specific drawings.  When Arthur finds the right answer, Dom stops crumpling inwards like a paper cup under pressure, and Arthur feels like one of them at least is making something of themselves.  Sometimes they even go for drinks to celebrate, at the theme bar on Main Street, where Dom gets lots of requests to shiver people’s timbers and Arthur smirks steadily into his piña colada.

Today has been a Bad Day.  It is raining.  Dom hasn’t changed his shirt in three days.  In the stack of returns one of the books still has coloured sticky labels protruding from the pages, and in another someone has seen fit to circle the name “Gaylord” in the dedication, and if either of these people think that Arthur won’t hunt them down and _rip them limb from limb_ then they are sorely mistaken.  He has a comprehensive database and too much time on his hands.  All those karate lessons as a kid were not for nothing.

Somewhere between the witty, witty annotations and his sixth cup of coffee Arthur stomps downstairs to fetch the Phaidon Atlas for Dom and finds a guy placing two 790s and a 340 on the end of a shelf.

-

When Eames was thirteen and still firmly on the scrawny side of puberty, he developed a fairly potent crush on his next-door neighbour resulting in years of barely disguised and ultimately unresolved sexual tension.

This is worse.

One moment he is innocently—mostly innocently—contemplating a copy of _The Craft of Forgery_ , and the next he is being descended upon by a vision in a sweater vest shouting something unintelligible about shelf marks.  Eames isn’t listening.  He is too busy being bedazzled.

Arthur the Librarian, identifiable by the badge and the general air of sexual frustration, is as it turns out considerably younger and less tweedy than Eames anticipated, and very cross with Eames for something that Eames has done.  ‘Cross’, in actual fact, does not do justice to the spectacle before Eames at this moment: to the hot flush creeping up the man’s neck, to the sleek lines of him, to the snap of syllables or the curl of disdain (just because Eames isn’t listening to the speech doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate the intonation).

A moment of silence stretches between the end of Arthur’s diatribe and Eames’s awareness of it, and that moment is bright with untold promise.

When Eames says, “Sorry,” the only thing he can be certain of is that he isn’t.  Not at all.

-

“Books,” Eames says, because he is nothing if not to the point, and Ariadne raises her eyebrow as if to say _can you be more specific?_ or possibly _why did you feel the need to slam your sketchbook on the desk for emphasis?_ Too soon to tell.  He elaborates:  “How would I go about getting some of those?”

“Are you a student?” she asks.  “Students just have to show a valid form of identification, fill out basic contact information.  You can take something out today.”

For a moment, Eames is tempted to say yes—he always was good at fake IDs, made a killing off it at school, and there’s a unique satisfaction in the act of flawless imitation—but this seems like a slippery, possibly even illegal slope (he’s not up on the laws over here, but he’d imagine it’s frowned upon).

“No,” he says.  “I’m not a student.”

Ariadne yanks open a drawer and pulls out a form, and says, “You’ll need to fill this out.”

The form is five pages long.

“This form is five pages long,” Eames says.

“It is,” she agrees, bright and unmoved.

Eames isn’t entirely sure what makes a collection special or if he might need to use one at any point; he dutifully scrawls out his contact details, ticks some boxes at random and clamps down on the urge to write “swashbuckler and rogue” under _occupation_.  At the section labelled _reason for using collections_ , he pauses, conscious that Ariadne is watching him with barely concealed amusement, and omits “indulging my hot librarian fetish” in favour of “research for a future exhibition”.  There are two full sides of terms and conditions, including such stipulations as _do not climb on the shelves_ and _ladders are to be used by library staff only_, because Health and Safety.  (Additionally: _do not throw the books_ and _no sleeping bags are permitted in the stacks_ , because Students.)

By the time Eames signs on the dotted line he has almost convinced himself that he is an actual, sensible grown up.

Almost.

“‘A future exhibition’?”

“I’m an artist,” Eames says, which is the truth and also better than his first instinct (“I’m an exhibitionist”).

Ariadne gives him a long look that says she knows exactly what he was about to say, possibly in addition to the fact that he is almost thirty and still occasionally eats his dinner off a Tupperware lid when he hasn’t done the dishes (Eames is an _artiste_ ).

Then she puts his form carefully in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, next to several bent paperclips and an empty Hershey’s wrapper.

“We’ll let you know when your application has been approved.”

Eames looks at her sadly.  “I thought we were kindred spirits,” he says, “but you are as terrifying as Arthur.  You just hide it better.”

“I like to think so,” she says.

-

It’s not such a big deal, really.  Being able to take books _out_ isn’t really the point, except in so far as it gives Eames an excuse to enter Arthur’s office.  As it is, Eames lingers.  He does a lot of lingering.  He flips idly through the Art History section.  He tries, unsuccessfully, to bribe Ariadne with a caramel latte.  He discovers by trial and error that the seat fourth from the right in the reading room gets the best light and also boasts an unimpeded view of Arthur in his swivel chair through the glass partition.

It would be wrong to say that there is a quiet beauty to Ellison Library; it is all creaky floorboards and draughty corners, doors opening and closing without cause or warning, and there is something growing determinedly in one corner of the lower stacks that Arthur is forced to attack one Friday with pungent chemicals.  (On that Friday there is much bending and squatting, and if Eames is forced to leave the building two hours early due to unanticipated fumes then it is worth it simply to have borne witness.)

Still, there’s something about the place, Eames thinks.  Something more than the beautiful librarian or the sassy receptionist; something that has to do with the squeak of branches on the glass of the window, and the slow spiral of dust motes in the patches of sunlight.

He just has A Feeling.  Eames is a strong believer in Feelings.  He followed his last one across the Atlantic.

He starts picking up bagels for the walk from his apartment to the library, and when Ariadne raises an eyebrow at the cream cheese on his fingers licks them dutifully clean.  He’s basically _housebroken_.  The things people do for love.

At any rate, Ariadne seems to have designated herself gatekeeper of the hot librarians, and who is Eames to argue with that, particularly when she points him so cheerfully to the Literature section, all the while running her fingers over the stapler in a way that inclines Eames to keep his hands off the reception desk.  Fortunately Eames finds the constant undertone of violence to be an attractive quality in a person (which is really what got him into this mess in the first place).

-

It’s one of those things that starts small, only to unexpectedly snowball, like the time Eames taught Elodie how to forge their mother’s signature.  He’s in the reading room, and Arthur’s in his office, and for once Eames has his laptop with him, in addition to sketchbook and pencils.  Rather than stare at the collar of Arthur’s shirt willing him to undo a button, Eames pulls up the Ellison Library website.

It’s in need of a little jazzing up—whoever designed it suffered from a _severe_ lack of imagination—and for the most part it is spectacularly uninteresting.  Directions, opening times, major collections, floorplan.  He clicks on the subsequent pages without any real curiosity, the fingers of his left hand tap-tap-tapping on the surface of the desk, until the words _further enquiries_ permeate, a little late, and he is forced to scroll back.  There’s an email address.

There’s an _email address_.

-

Roberta Gardner emerges fully-formed in Eames’s mind at three AM, with peripheral interests in botany and reality television, two cats named Merry and Pippin, and a professional interest in the work of e. e. cummings.  Her email is short and polite and Eames sends it partly to see what will happen, if anything _does_ happen, and to watch Arthur’s reaction.

It might have stopped there, had Arthur responded with a link to the item in question and a dry _if you have any further enquiries_ , but as Eames had ~~hoped~~ feared Arthur is absolutely bloody _delightful_.  He is the consummate professional, of course, but his responses are elaborate and thoughtful and unexpectedly _warm_ , with the wandering sentences and helpful suggestions of someone keen to prolong the interaction; if the _please don’t hesitate_ isn’t indication enough, Eames catches the smile as Arthur sends the email and it’s a fucking revelation.

Arthur’s smile is a twist of the lips but it transforms his face in the same way that anger does; flashes in his eyes and settles in his shoulders.  Arthur furious is taller, darker, sharper.  Arthur pleased is taller, brighter, _beautiful._

Eames never stood a chance.

Arthur is good at what he does, that much is clear.  He is unfazed by questions about twentieth-century poets or Middle Eastern ceramics or biochemistry or even Taylor Swift.  Roberta Gardner, inevitably, is the first of many.  If he were a writer, Eames thinks idly, he would never have to google anything again.  Why consult Wikipedia when one has an _Arthur_?  Wikipedia is, yes, quick and accessible and useful in a pinch but it is also poorly sourced and unreliable and mostly importantly it does not get that little wrinkle at the bridge of its nose when faced with an unusual query.  Wikipedia’s sweaters are not 100% cashmere.  Its eyes are not sharp and bright and brown.  Wikipedia does not know the majesty of The Smiths.

Arthur does.

(Wikipedia also does not shout at Eames when he puts things on the wrong shelves, but in all honesty Eames wasn’t disciplined enough as a child.  It’s almost certainly for his own good.)

-

Generally speaking, Eames is good at people.  He wouldn’t be much of an artist if he weren’t.  He looks and he can see the angles of them, the light and shade; it takes him a little while sometimes, to see the subtleties, but he does.  The blond man— _Dom_ , he hears Arthur call him—isn’t difficult to read.  Dom is a mess of tics and tells behind elbow patches and a bad haircut; screams _awkward academic_ from fifty paces, and _bad divorce_ from ten.  He’s in once or twice a week, at least, which means Eames has ample opportunity to observe him in all his neurotic splendour: the way he loses pencils and bottle caps and his phone and the occasional set of keys in the piles of books and papers he strews across the desk; the way Arthur shifts seamlessly around him, moving open bottles of water out of reach of wayward elbows and handing Dom things before he asks for them.

As a character study, Dom is gold.  He is also the reason that Eames sees Arthur laugh for the first time, and that fact fills Eames with irrational envy.  He goes home that night and sulks into a tub of Phish Food.

Now he watches Dom and sees the easy way they move around _each other_ , and wonders what it would be like to inspire that sort of loyalty in Arthur (to be the person in his personal space).  Dom is a mess of a man, Eames thinks, and yet Arthur likes him.  He’s not the only one.

Eames is standing at reception as Dom comes in one day.  Eames sees the way Ariadne softens when she speaks to him.  Eames says, when the man has moved on, “Are the two of you—?” and lets the implication hang in the air between them.

“I’m far too smart for unrequited love,” Ariadne informs him, with the sort of good-humoured disapproval that she offers in lieu of affection.

“It’s only unrequited until it isn’t,” Eames tells her.  He is full of these wise adages.

“You’re the sort of person who sees laundry instructions as a challenge, aren’t you?”

“No one knows what those mean,” says Eames.

-

On Monday, Arthur arrives at the library with a raspberry hot chocolate to find that Ariadne is already clutching one.  There is an application waiting for him on his desk.

-

Eames does toy, idly, with the idea of plundering the stacks for collections of sonnets, or the Psychology section for books about love and relationships, but decides that it might be a little _too_ on the nose. 

Rather than compare anyone to a summer’s day, Eames carries piles of books up to the reading room—odd combinations of books, anything with an odd title or obscure subject matter, books thick enough to be used as doorstops, books he can’t imagine anyone has ever taken out.  When he finds a particularly good one—for example, _I Still Miss My Man But My Aim Is Getting Better_ —he hauls them into the library office at the end of the day and then home to join the growing pile on the top of his dresser.

There are no lingering glances or brushing fingertips.  Arthur is never anything other than briskly and pleasantly professional—either he has forgotten he shouted at Eames, or he has forgiven him the transgression—but occasionally Eames thinks Arthur’s mouth twitches when he’s scanning the barcode, and Eames counts that a small but undeniable victory.  In the meantime he sits in the fourth seat from the right and clutches Arthur’s occasional smiles to him like the hard-won riches they are.

One side effect of the increased attention, of course, is the pressure to appear to be doing something productive.  Fortunately, Eames spent a lot of his school years trying to look busy.  He is an old hand at it.  His maths exercise books were full of half-formed equations and crude caricatures.  Pencils are his weapon of choice.

-

It’s been a quiet day, and a good one.  No obnoxious teenagers, no frantic Dom; just the pretty guy with the crooked smile and penchant for bizarre reading material, and the sunlight warming Arthur’s desk.

To: Roberta Gardner <regardner@gmail.com>  
From: Library Assistant <libraryassistant@ellisonlibrary.org>  
Subject: Re: Enquiry

> Dear Roberta,
> 
> I have managed to locate the article in question: the author is A. M. Welch and the article was published in _Style_ , Vol. 47, No. 2 (2014): 215-47.  We have access to the journal here at Ellison.  While seeking the article I also stumbled across references to McCormick, _Haiku and the Modern American Poet_ (2006) and Maeda, _On Translating the Haiku Form_ (1999), both of which are available in our general collection.  I can place the books in question on hold for you if you wish to take them out.
> 
> In addition, Martin Heusser’s upcoming monograph _Temporal Paradoxes in Fiction and Stylistics in American Literatures_ (expected to be published 2016) may be of some interest to you.
> 
> Please do let me know if I can be of any more assistance, and feel free to stop by the library if there is anything I might help with in person.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Arthur

As he types, Arthur is struck with the realization, belated as it might be, that he is good at this.  He is _really fucking excellent at this_.

Arthur grins.

-

“I don’t know,” Dom says, midway through his fourth piña colada.  “Just— _different_.  Did you get laid?”

-

Arthur has been going to the Lone Gull coffee shop a couple of times a week at least for the last two years—walking out of his way for Ariadne’s raspberry hot chocolate, and the good coffee, and the fact that no one who works there has ever tried to engage him in awkward small talk.  It’s part of his routine, part of the local landscape, familiar and reassuring up until the day that he walks in to find his face on the wall.

The place is unusually busy, and he’s waiting in line, and while the woman at the head of the queue is ordering her iced skinny mocha latte Arthur is looking at the art on the wall next to him.  They usually have a few pieces up by local artists—seascapes, mainly, the odd portrait here and there—but right now there are a lot of them, and they’re all of a similar style.  Either someone has been incredibly prolific, or they’ve been gradually accumulating and Arthur hasn’t noticed (unlike him).  Anyhow, Arthur usually prefers his art a little more disconcerting, a little less comfortable, but there’s something about the lines and the brushwork that catches his eye, and then holds his attention.

They’re all of the local area; he recognises a corner, a street sign here and there.  Mocha Latte picks up her drink from the counter and the line dwindles; Arthur shuffles dutifully forward, and the movement brings him in line with the next group of paintings, at which point he finds himself rooted to the spot.

They’re of Ellison Library.  And they’re _gorgeous_.  It’s the windows that draw his gaze first; the wood of the frame and the view of the street beyond strikingly familiar.  There’s a painting of the foyer viewed from halfway up the stairs, and another of a flickering lightbulb from the lower stacks.  Fuck, there’s one of the cobweb he got rid of _last week_ , stretched between two shelves in the Magnolia Wing; he can read the titles on the spines of the books—

There’s one of him.  Arthur swallows, aware that his heart is beating very, very quickly, and edges forward for a closer look.  It _is_ him, Arthur, no question, even if no one would know it at a glance: he’s standing in profile, silhouetted against the windows in the reading room, in his favourite sweater vest, reaching for the ladder to set it against the wall.  His arm bisects the picture.  His eyes are bright.

He loses his place in line.

-

Arthur buys the picture.  He buys the picture instead of his coffee and carries it back to the library and through the foyer, where Ariadne opens her mouth to ask but he just sweeps past and up the stairs and into his office and shuts the door, where it is safe and no one will see it but him.

It seemed like a good idea in theory, but now that it’s sitting in his office it’s taking up an awful lot of desk space, and frankly anyone who comes to take a book out is going to think he’s a massive narcissist.  Arthur looks at it again and frowns.

The signature on the corner of the picture is an indecipherable squiggle, but the slip of paper by the frame in the coffee shop read, “ _Life’s Not A Paragraph”_ , _by Eames_.  Arthur leans back in his chair, and then pulls open the browser and googles “eames + artist + ma”.  A blog pops up, where there are more beautiful pictures but no photos of the artist, and a bio page in desperate need of proofreading.  It’s equal parts obscure pop culture references and bizarre tangents—there’s a weird digression on the importance of buying the right kind of ketchup—and none of it tells Arthur anything about the man himself.

Thing is, Arthur has heard the name before.  He knows he has.  After a moment’s consideration, he types it into the search engine of the member database, and comes up with one hit: Eames, Christopher, who since November has taken out such classics as _The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake_ and _A History of Chemical Warfare_ and in fact _Valegro: Champion Horse_ , and Arthur thinks, _oh_.

And then he thinks, _oh_.  Arthur opens his email inbox and goes to the folder marked ‘enquiries’ and the sub-folder ‘subject-specific’ and then he proceeds to google Roberta Gardner, who is not listed in the staff directory at the department of English at Mount Holyoke, and then Lucas Hale, who _is_ actually a marine biologist but in London, England.  Emily Harding and Max Beckman appear to be similarly fictitious.

Possibly Arthur should have picked up on the fact that all of these people have gmail accounts rather than actual institutional emails, but it’s not like there’s much call for fraud prevention in this sort of situation, or frankly any precedent at all for this sort of situation, and it is as he’s mulling this particular point that there is a knock at the door and Arthur swivels in his chair to find Eames, Christopher standing in the entrance to his office holding a copy of _Sushi For Beginners_.

Eames’s eyes flick from the picture propped against the wall to the emails open on Arthur’s computer, to Arthur himself, and he opens his mouth to speak.  Closes it again.  Takes a deep breath.

Steeling himself, Arthur thinks.  Waiting for the verdict.  He looks like a little boy, caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Arthur would be annoyed, but the truth is he has never been less bored with his life than since Eames began wreaking his particular form of havoc on it, and so instead of slamming the door in the man’s face he says, carefully—affectionately—“I found the article on bioluminescent phytoplankton you were looking for.”

There is a beat and then Eames smiles at him, dazzlingly, and says, “Darling.  Of course you did.”

Like he wouldn’t have expected anything less.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Peter Gabriel song because I am a huge sap and, oh yeah, 5000 words of library-based mush because I am a huge sap.
> 
> For parts of this I drew on my experience of working in a small, idiosyncratic (British) library, I apologise for any major differences in the workings of US libraries that have eluded me, hopefully they aren't too glaring (though I'm always interested to know, so feel free to point them out!).


End file.
